Why are Liberals so smug? Why are Millenials into crazy fads? Why are Baby Boomers responsible for the unraveling of America's societal fabric? Why are Gen Xers so easily overlooked? Why are Trekkies hostile towards Firefly fans? Why are artists so full of themselves? Why are cat owners eccentric and reclusive? Why are gamers still living in their parents' basements? Why do people who espouse the dangers of stereotypes in one breath embrace and extrapolate from them in another breath when it fits their agenda?
Except this isn't saying "Population A has a lower rate of colon cancer than populations B, C, and D, let's use a ton of research and data collection to try and figure out why to help out other populations." This article is "Let's look at conservatives, call them gullible so we can be smug about it, and use a bunch of conjecture and spurious logic to so we can feel self assured and self righteous in our smugness all the while not actually striving to achieve any social good except to further polarize and ostracize the other in our own minds." The dude keeps on saying things like "conservatives think this" and "conservatives approach the world in this way" in situations to imply they cold, calculating, cowardly, or what ever and never even addresses how those world views can be beneficial both for people as individuals and as collective communities. This is a smear piece.
It is not a smear piece. It is saying "Population A has a higher likelihood of believing logically questionable assertions than Population B, let's figure out why." It's not a new exploration. The research dates back to the Vietnam War, at least as reported by Dan Pink in Drive (2009). The causes may be semantic, in that liberals have looser alliances and allegiances and therefore are more investigative of their beliefs. Fundamentally? Liberal beliefs are aligned with objective truths while conservative beliefs are aligned with ideology. Ideology is not beholden to fact. Therefore, conservatives are less concerned with facts.Conservatives will probably be elated by these findings. But for others, Kahan’s conclusions are likely to be quite controversial, especially since he packages them alongside a critique of a leading strategy to communicate the reality of climate change, namely, by emphasizing that 97 percent of scientists agree that humans are causing global warming. Kahan thinks that’s a way of pushing conservatives’ political identity buttons, rather than tapping into their knowledge.
I would add the caveat: In this country, in this political system, at this time. In other times and places it has been the other way around. The Joke deals with why the Communists couldn't afford to have even a slight sense of humor (because ideological purism crumbles under its own weight the minute any chinks in the armor are exposed). I think conservatism in America fits that paradigm at this moment. Modern small l liberalism is basically data driven, and this is driving the ideological inheritors of Reagan's Evil Empire worldview deeper and deeper into their caves, so much so that even the conservative ideas of yesterday (e.g. the ACA) are now some giant liberal conspiracy. I think rd95 is taking exception because he knows many conservative people who are just people, and refuses to believe that any group who is bound only by a common set of ideas can be lumped together with such a broad and horrible descriptor such as "tends to believe lies." I would like to weigh in and assuage his concerns by saying that is not conservatism per se that gives one this quality. It's blind belief in ideas whose maxims have not been able to stand empirical testing and are now disintegrating. Right now that describes republicans/conservatives perfectly. Edit: But this is exactly why we should fear republicans so much right now. Crumbling ideology is what leads to totalitarianism. Remember that at first, the Soviets allowed elections in Central and Eastern Europe, because they were somewhat confident that the people would elect the proletariat. After the people discovered what a sham Bolshevism is, they rejected it, at which time the USSR started imposing their will militarily (e.g. in Hungary and Czechoslovakia).Fundamentally? Liberal beliefs are aligned with objective truths while conservative beliefs are aligned with ideology. Ideology is not beholden to fact. Therefore, conservatives are less concerned with facts.
Your caveat is flawed and has no basis in truth. If you're "conservative" you wish to slow or halt social change. If you're "liberal" you embrace social change. Science is the practice of turning unknowns into knowns and expanding the boundaries of the human sphere. You can want conservatism to be about anything other than the refutation of progress but it's in the definition, man. Communists? The Joke is a book about a man trapped by a 100-year-old discredited ideology propped up by violence. By the time of the Prague Spring Marx was 80 years dead.
As an aside I was trying to untangle weather Republicans are ideological or just partisan before I read this piece. Relatively mainstream republican rhetoric against the FBI sounds more like Huey Newton's Black Panthers than anyone that would slap a blue lives matter sticker on the back of their vehicle. Balanced budgets haven't been the issue of any importance since they took power. Roy Moore and Donald Trumps free pass on sexual improriety from a party that claims to want to preserve family values above all is another example. These were just the three striking examples of republican abandonment of ideology in favor of partisanship. I don't know where this fits into the discussion exactly but questioning Republican dedication to ideology is where my mind was at today. I don't know enough actual Republicans anymore to know if they are dumb as stumps or not. I've known smart ones and dumb ones aplenty. I know a bunch of dim bulb Democrats here in liberal land. You could cherry pick yourself a bushel off any corner, but I guess Portlandia already did that.
Partisan. 100% partisan. Republican and Democratic rhetoric, for most of the 20th century, was about economic policy with social policy thrown in. Mostly, political parties were aligned based on what we thought we should do with our money. Then LBJ passed civil rights and pissed off the Southern Democrats enough for them to become the Dixiecrats. Then Lee Atwater and crew discovered that there were racist votes up for grabs and said "we hate darkies, too! Come fly your flags, rebs!" and all of a sudden the divide was social as well as economic. In order to get the numbers, the economic Republicans have to throw sops to the social Republicans and as the Democrats have moved right, the Republicans have had to dig deeper and deeper into the social bag to keep up their membership. The biggest threat to moderate Repubicans isn't Democrats, it's the Tea Party. It's the Freedom Caucus. Republicans don't fear Democrats. They fear primary challengers. And the primary challengers are winner-take-all. When George Will drops his Republican Party membership, the ideological heart of the party is gone.
But research shows they're more gullible and it also explains why. It's the equivalent of saying black people have higher rates of poverty. Then you accept that and can work to understand why. The article is nuanced and points out blind spots for each political affiliation. Prejudices are judgemental; this article is not. I didn’t recognize an agenda in the article. It makes a point of saying that it's not an issue of education. I don't get the impression you read the article
Are you disputing the data or the conclusions? (Or just reacting the data and conclusions?) What in particular is shit about it? EDIT: All right, I need to edit my response in response to the edit of your response. A "smear" piece? I don't think so. What they write about matches closely with my experience. My father is a conservative and probably one of the smartest persons you'll ever meet. And yet, last time I met him we were in a room with all of his friends, all conservatives, and I was treated to such nuggets as: "There is not one thing that Obama accomplished these last 8 years" (lots of agreement to that in the room). My father saying "I couldn't vote for Hillary, she's dishonest." (Oh. My. God.) And later in a discussion of gun control he's citing Chicago as an example of how gun control has the opposite effect. It took me 5 minutes of reading up on the Chicago problem to be able to articulate the problem with Chicago, and I was accused of just reading liberal propaganda, to which I needed to respond that I had read a variety of sources, because to find the truth you need to look at all sides and examine all data. This fell on deaf ears -- the argument did not fit with his preconceived notions and he was unwilling to consider other data. Nope, just look at Chicago. Gun control is bad. (This is also a guy who has never owned a gun or experienced anything about guns.) Did I mention he is one of the smartest guys I know? His conservatism makes him stupid, and I find it very sad. This article goes into detail about where this kind of mindset comes from. And yes, it backs it with DATA. It claims that conservatives will ignore this data. So if you want to just sit there and say it's a smear campaign against conservatives and ignore the data, you're fitting pretty well into the very picture they're painting. Maybe it's a trap?
I'm not disputing the data. I'm disputing the display of the data because it's heavy handed and one sided and doesn't give conservatives a fair shake. Edit: And half of his "data" isn't even data but just cherry picked anecdotes and quotes that support his worldview.
Which is it? It's not like this phenomenon is undocumented.I'm not disputing the data.
his "data" isn't even data
I keep hearing this, and started looking a bit. In trying to get numbers, I come to this article which seems to agree with Wikipedia, so take that for all it is worth BUT.... Baby Boomers: 79 Million Gen X: 64 Million Millennials: 81 Million I did not realize that there were so may of the "Gen X" people. I thought there were fewer than 60 million of us. Granted depending on who is writing the article I am a young Boomer or an old GenXer, so if i get to pick I go with GenX, because fuck the Boomers. The other thing is the mortality rate. Look at the Silents; a decent percentage of them died in childhood while most of the Boomers, especially the later Boomers made it to adulthood. Also of note? Every single human being to have walked on the surface of another world was a Silent. The Apollo astronauts were all born between 1929 and 1940. I live in my OWN basement, thankverymuch!Why are Gen Xers so easily overlooked?
Why are gamers still living in their parents' basements?